Greenstreet

By Steven T. Pankey

The story is told in well-arranged pieces. The book approaches two people who approach crime like theater. All the human characters in Greenstreet are strangers to one another. What they do not do is judge one another. For these two special people, their social function is to become millionaires. The book is about an illusory world a writer can create. Writing can be thought of as heroic. There is a barrier to success and a hurdle on the way to becoming a hero. Several people in the book take leaps in a change in their bearing. It is possible at times to lose oneself in the written world. The best reporter in this book is the reader. This is made possible by its emotional trickery. This alternative lets the reader speak critically about its comedy and tragedy. You may be able to observe your own change within. The idea is not to leave you narrow-minded. If you have ideas, do it. The book’s characters are telling you what to do. All within reason. There is opportunity here for people with ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662416736

Book preview

Chapter One

Flo and Jimmy, she the mastermind and he the doer of ill deeds for the gold bullion snatch, were not able to agree on anything. They piled coinage and ingots into wooden crates at the top of the stairs. Both maintained a businesslike manner, but she was nervous. He was bullying her in every way. Shadows had lengthened. The timetable for possession of over a million dollars in negotiable gold coins and ingots pressured them. Jimmy kept his head down, moving crates. Flo tried to look busy. She flashed a gold credit card with a ten-thousand-dollar limit. He looked at it and smiled, then mumbled something about his money’s worth. She took out a check and made it out to him for fifteen thousand dollars. He insisted that he should stay with this. She was agitated. He ignored an outstretched hand holding the check and closed the back door to the van.

No one, absolutely no one, observed these two unless you were standing at the back of the big white tent in the front of the yard. These two obscure people were now in possession of more than a decorative fruit basket. They could drive the van out past the guard gate, but they could not disappear like bamboo shoots in the forest. They needed to ride a tsunami and shelter themselves from a tidal wave of law enforcement.

Jimmy would not hear of separating himself from the treasure. He had looted the safe. The original plan was for Jimmy to go back into the house, drop the electric main, switch DVD playback to camera live, and wait for security. Then stonewall them. Avoid making self-incriminating statements. Say nothing. Do nothing out of the ordinary. Play the dummy. Not say a thing.

He would not speak of her plan. Only his plan. Stay with the money. Flo was perplexed. Jimmy was a salesman. He offered to help her change bullion and coins into dollars. Whatever it takes. He kept pronouncing a word wrong. Whenever he said bullion, he made it sound like bool-nun. She thought it could be an edge if they found a bullion broker. She thought it displayed ignorance. Upset and nervous at the prospect of a new partner, this was a giant hole in her overall plan. She felt she was sinking. The plan was for her to disappear. To leave him behind to cover up. As the first suspect, he would make no change in lifestyle. Her plans were discarded, now that he’d seen the score. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This situation meant they were a bride and groom. The stolen treasure a gift, and on its way to the honeymoon. For Flo, the honeymoon was over. Jimmy an unwelcome guest on her little adventure. She looked at her involvement with him as a musical scale. How could she sing that tune? She felt played like a scale when Jimmy wouldn’t leave the van.

Flo was set to drive out the front gate. She thought of pruning him, at willow trees on two sides of the front gate. He thought it best to follow her to the last leg. She thought of severing him midway. He thought of the uncut pile. When she pulled the van up to the guard gate, a guard was standing in the street hailing a taxi for two players leaving the board game party.

Defeating Flo’s purpose was not Jimmy’s idea. He wanted to stay on track. What he wanted was half or better. Less than half was going to leave him unsatisfied. He was rich and he wanted to stay that way. Flo was full of ideas. The ones she wanted to use she couldn’t bring up. Or wouldn’t. The most shocking ones she would hint at.

So she played along. Clinging the treasure to herself. She drove the van. She looked at him and thought him handsome. He looked at her and thought she was pretty. They made a pair. She noticed he turned on the radio. Then she turned it off. Jimmy thought of what lay on the horizon. He imagined an ocean in front of him. She pulled the van into the street and made a slow right-hand turn. No one seemed to notice them. Flo did not accelerate or press the gas pedal. About three blocks down the road a large box truck was parked at the side of the road. She pulled the van in front of it.

When she pulled over, he reached and took the keys. He clutched them in his hand and walked to the rear of the box truck. He unlocked the rolling door with a key dangling from the lock. Then he hurried toward the board game party. When he arrived at the gate, the guard just nodded and he entered, then walked to the house. He went into the front of the house which put him in an ordinary shot from the video camera. Standing in the quiet house he felt how vacant it was. The hum of the quiet zone refrigerator was the only noise.

He noticed how high the ceilings in each room were as he walked through them. He felt as if his head had expanded, and his dome was a larger room. The treasure they’d stolen was the reason for his state of mind. It hadn’t made the house larger just his perceptions sharper but brittle. He glanced down at his shoes and expected to see the edges of his soles turned to gold. They hadn’t. He hoped they would. He knew that Flo, just three blocks away, must be nervous and frustrated. He had the keys to the treasure van, and the truck they were switching to.

He had a purpose in the house, and he wanted to walk out like the blackjack dealer who opens his fingers and claps his hands. So he went into the kitchen and took a roll of silver duct tape from a drawer and went into the laundry room. In a sink he ran water over three towels he retrieved from a drawer. He placed a wet towel in each of three dryers. He turned them on, then turned to the breaker switch panel and pulled the red lever turning off all power in the house. This turned off the lights, the clothes dryers, the clock on the top of the electric stove, the electric water heater, the clock on the nightstand upstairs, and the LED lights that indicated that in-house power is directed to the security cameras which had been placed in strategic positions in the house and outside the house, where the walk-in safe guarded the treasure of coins, ingots and valuables.

With the power gone to the cameras, Jimmy walked directly to the security closet, unlocked the door and standing on a footstool, removed the in-line DVD players that had falsely played a nonthreatening picture observant security guards would not consider a risk. Jimmy calmly put the cameras back into picture capture line and put the DVD players, three of them, into a towel, folding them in neatly. He then locked the door and, carrying the folded towel, went back into the laundry room and restored the breaker switch. The phone rang.

When the phone rang, Jimmy knew it was security calling from the video observation post they maintained. Two men sat in a room viewing cameras for clients, and when the disruption occurred, they phoned the house. The house phone usually rang when security or the chimney sweep called. Jimmy went about his business of taping the DVD players, very slender and thin, underneath the drawers of the cabinet built into the wall. They fit well, and with gray duct tape, he firmly positioned them at the bottom and nudged a metal corner into the wood on the underside of the drawer. He felt they were firmly seated under the drawer.

The phone stopped ringing, but he knew they would wait ten seconds and call back. He caught the fourth ring the second time and answered in his own voice, though he considered using a fake voice. He answered, Miller Day residence, and explained to the security guard that the laundry room was making the breakers pop the main. The security guard noted a previous visit had been logged earlier in the day. The notation said, Central power. The guard said he would send a car immediately. Jimmy replied, We’ll be expecting you, which the guard thought odd. He notified a car on standby, and two guards quickly found the address on the GPS computer in their car and went at an unhurried pace toward the Miller Day house. Jimmy also was unhurried as he walked to the side door and went outside.

With the camera restored he was now being videotaped in the very spot he’d been standing a few minutes before while loading the van with stolen property. He knew someone had placed the security cameras on a priority watch at the communications center. So he was calm as he walked toward the back of the main tent where the board game party was going full blast.

He approached the back of the tent with no particular sense of urgency and, pushing aside a flap, stepped into the noisy atmosphere. As soon as Jimmy entered the tent, he caught the eye of Wally, his Jamaican sweetheart, who was taking a turn on the dance floor, in the arms of a guy Jimmy recognized. Calio had returned lost luggage to her hotel room more than three dozen hours ago. His expression said nothing. Jimmy could see a misty look in her eyes. Her eyes never left his as he walked toward the middle of the room along the tent’s edge. Wally, the sweetheart, took to the practice of leading on the dance floor and steered her partner around a looping circle. She kept her eyes on Jimmy as he made his way to the front of the tent. It loomed like an open doorway to the Tunnel of Love ride at a theme park. He saw this exit as part of a giant Cupid Shuffle, where he got the treasure, the yacht, the sports car, the beautiful girl, and a big bag of chips. He knew the dance he had to do. He needed a plan and a genie in a bottle.

As he exited the tent and walked toward the guard, he nodded as he walked onto the street past him. Still moving toward two vehicles far ahead, he could see Flo looking at him and shaking her head. He had to learn to love Flo and everything she was going to mean. He thought about it for a moment and decided to play the henpecked gorilla. Whatever it took he had to make it work with Flo. That meant half or more of the treasure. Getting away with it. He started to work on it.

Flo waited for a few moments after Jimmy walked back toward the Miller Day residence and opened the second parked vehicle, the Clams and Chowder truck with the key that dangled from the lock. Inside was her key to the success in this plan to get bullion and coins out of the country and into the hands of anyone who could make this asset a bank deposit. She realized she did not have the ignition keys to either of the vehicles. She was first angry, then calmed herself realizing she had to wait for Jimmy. If she could buy him off, she would at least use his help to switch vans. Since she did not want to attract any attention to herself, she sat in the back of the van and sifted through boxes of gold. Even in the back of a van that still smelled of vegetable matter, she could feel the hair on her head rise as she looked through the valuable stolen treasure. She thought of spa treatments she could afford, looked at her worn shoes, and considered tossing them onto the sidewalk. She did not do this because she knew they were a necessary part of her next plan. That plan in general was hit the road, beat feet, make like a tree, and leave. This idea was short and simple. Complicated had been her route.

Knowing she must pose Jimmy in one more awkward circumstance, she considered the possibility of an argument with Jimmy. Any kind of an argument over any subject. The subject of dynamite. The subject of tax. An argument dynamiting a deep chasm between them. She must take her treasure and begin a journey immense and long but rewarding. How she wanted this money they’d stolen. Now it was hers. It was also Jimmy’s. At least part of it. She hoped to carve out a bargain.

Flo had been making bargains since she graduated with an associate’s degree from a junior college, and then a bachelor’s degree from a state university. She had earned her degree in anthropology. Her studies concentrated on the history of Africa. She traveled overseas with her passport to Australia. Not the next hop to Africa because she didn’t have the money to do it. She knew of the origins of man, in Africa. The discovery of the world’s largest diamond mine in 1871 in the country of Transvaal. In 1886 gold deposits were discovered in the Witwatersrand, a gold deposit running for sixty-five miles. Mines were famous for their depths into the earth, named Jumpers’ Deep, Glen Deep, Village Deep, and Crown Deep. Johannesburg, in the Transvaal, became part of the state of South Africa, founded in 1910. A man named Paul Kruger changed his country’s history. She had stolen from history a name she would try to use in her escape. In a crate in the back of the truck behind her bullion treasure, she had packed an old cast-iron cannon she was posing as a historical antique. She would travel to a country she hoped would not notice her.

Flo had been a determined student. History studies opened her mind. The school experience led her to search for artifacts. She looked for old silverware, cups, and plates in thrift stores, at flea markets, and in estate sales. She thought she had a silver spoon from an English colonel from the War of 1812 inscribed with his name, and the military unit he’d commanded. It turned out to be a fake. A forged document was in the bottom of the wooden box. She paid 175 dollars for it, more for the carved wooden box, but the item wasn’t authentic.

Real gold she’d stolen from the house. She knew she’d have a difficult time selling it. How to get the American dollar from the pile of gold. She couldn’t buy a supersize television with ingots. She wanted dollars. She went out and had an oversize fake made that would conceal the pile of gold in a false bottom of a wooden container. It would be heavy enough to add more weight and conceal a load of gold bullion in a compartment. To this artifact, a medium weight cannon made in the style of the late 1800s, she added three inscriptions. First, she had a workman skilled in metal works place the name Kruger. Second, she had another etch out the name, Transvaal. Third, she had another include the year 1899. The cannon made from melted iron chairs, and a table, and a fire hydrant she’d bought on the internet were made in the style of the day. The fire hydrant inscribed with Boston, 1900, also the type of steel found in heavy cast iron and steel, at the turn of the century. The fire hydrant she’d paid six hundred dollars for and shipped by truck from a collector who’d displayed it in a steelworks museum in Pittsburg. One workman cast the cannon. Another workman did the inscriptions. A third made a wooden shipping crate with an open compartment in the bottom. A fourth helped her forge documents stating the authenticity of the cannon’s origin. Transvaal, 1899. Kruger was president.

Paul Kruger was born in a northern part of the region in 1825 and raised by his father. A mature boy he claimed two tracts of land, each six thousand acres. One for his cattle to graze, the other a farm to raise crops. The land and the region he shared with beasts of Africa and tribes of the Zulu. His stature rose. Most of the original settlers of Transvaal were farmers, as was Kruger, known as Boers. With ambitions, Kruger was elected president of Transvaal in 1883. Kruger served four terms as president. Transvaal’s Boers accepted British rule in 1887. Britain dominated the region. Questions of taxation arose. The British used troops to quell violence and confront disruptive citizens. Kruger received a letter from a political ally stating, The Queen cannot be advised to relinquish her sovereignty of the Transvaal. Kruger said war would come. Despite British sovereignty, Kruger stood for President in 1898, at age seventy-three. He won his fourth term. Transvaal nationalized dynamite used for mining.

Shipment of the cannon was planned in a crate of oak inside lighter veneer made to look heavier than it was. A metal underlay was placed on the floor of the cannon’s compartment. The metal floor patterned by metal scraps. It was attractive and functional. It would serve the purpose of hiding bullion in the flat compartment underneath. The fake, forged cannon, weighing about 160 pounds, sat on wooden tiers. It was called a twelve-pounder. Kruger as a young man held a four-pounder in his hand and shot at a rhino, losing part of his thumb. In 1898 the amount of gold produced by the country of Transvaal was double that of 1895. The Boer War of 1899 pitted professionally trained British troops against fifty thousand Transvaal troops. Kruger went into exile after the defeat of Boer troops in 1900. He never returned to Transvaal after his exile. He felt gold in the Transvaal would be weighed by a river of tears. A feminine statute built in front of Parliament was said to be a statute of Minerva, the Roman goddess of war. Kruger ordered a helmet be made and placed on her head. His comment was A lady…must have a hat.

At the base of the cannon Flo commissioned made, she had inscribed Kruger’s name. Complete with fake papers of antiquity, it was bound for South Africa. There she hoped to sell gold ingots and coins concealed in the bottom of the shipping crate. On the east side of the tip of Africa, you find pirates. Pirates hold shipping for ransom. Millions of dollars in ransom. They have cash from their dealings and could purchase bullion. Who else could provide the dollars for her giant windfall? Below the Tropic of Capricorn. Cape Town. West was the Namib Desert and the Skeleton Coast.

Flo looked through the window at the side of the van and saw the face of Jimmy. When he walked to the passenger side at the front and kicked the tire, she knocked on the window. He looked up, then walked back, and opened the rear door of the van. Jimmy said, Hello, Flo, with considerable respect in his voice, and extended his hand. She took his hand then he helped her onto the sidewalk, a gentlemanly hand on her elbow. She shivered at his touch.

Flo, leaning on the dictates of a woman in power, had been a leader, using her sixth sense and reading all the signs and picking up on clues left behind. This had been her enterprise. She had acted with experience that came with her craft. It was craft. She was going into an area where she had no familiarity. She had never been to South Africa. She now regarded pirates as a resource in her scheme. Britain and Germany both had an interest in South Africa a century earlier. She could choose the Indian Ocean side of the tip of Southern Africa, or the Atlantic Side and Cape Town. She chose the Atlantic side, where she thought pirates would be found. She wanted a fortune in dollars. Perhaps a German man, or a man with British ancestry, or a man whose background ran to the country of Portugal. The right sort of man. Or maybe just a man from the town east in Ladysmith. Or, a man in Cape Town who meets a lady, a leader, with gold bullion to trade.

Flo was enjoying special treatment from Jimmy. He caressed her elbow on the sidewalk. She wriggled out of his grasp, however, and walked along the sidewalk toward the box van parked behind the vegetable van. He bounced along beside genially. She noticed how romantic he appeared to be about their upcoming? She halted in her steps. An undertaking? Yes, I suppose it would be. Well, what was it? Was it a fool’s errand? No. No. No. These thoughts stopped Flo in her tracks.

She turned to Jimmy and noticed a curious glance toward her. He stepped off the sidewalk and took the key to the padlock. He unsnapped the lock and rolled the door up to the top of the van with a single push. There on a pallet was the oak box Flo had commissioned. Inside was the cannon made by her iron fabricator. The box, made of hardwood, had a shine on it and was in the shape of a banana. It was sleek looking. Flo had insisted the piece be made similar to a piece of luggage. Too long for the pallet on which it sat sideways on, it had wheels built into the underside. The carpenter had also been commissioned to take off all the sharp corners and edges to give it the look of a modern, up-to-date piece of airline luggage. Luggage with a hardwood veneer. The lid had a piano hinge on one side and two built-in locks on the other. Flo carefully withdrew from her purse a key which she jangled on a piece of chain. She put her foot onto a ladder at the edge of the truck, and Jimmy did the same on the other side. She clambered up. They stepped closer to the hardwood luggage. She unlocked the box with the key and swung up the lid.

Jimmy had never seen this thing before. Flo tried to pick it up at one end and stand it on the flatter end. Jimmy made a squawking noise and stepped behind her to help. The whole thing including the cannon weighed two hundred pounds and stood without needing to be balanced, and the cannon, which was strapped to the tiers, pointed skyward. Jimmy stood and looked at the thing of art and craft. Turning toward Flo, he could see a fiery look of love in her eyes. She was admiring her piece of luggage like a miraculous sight. Jimmy realized he would have to put up with a bit of competition for her admiration.

She startled Jimmy with the sound of her voice and said, You are my right-hand man, Jim. She grasped the end of the chain, which held the key to the luggage locks, and poked it link by link into an empty hole at the very top, inside the box. When she had pushed it entirely into the wooden aperture, she jiggled it and heard a click. Then from a small compartment in front of her, she took a screwdriver with a star tip and turned a screw several revolutions. Then she pulled on the chain and a compartment door opened, which then folded like a fan and opened a hole in the floor of the luggage piece. A magnet on the end of the chain had found another magnet in the hole and that had given her a pull she needed.

Jimmy watched amazed at the process. She turned her head woodenly and said, We need the crates. He was out